March 30, 2010

Difficulty Learning Sight Words

It is Saturday, the sun is shining, my flower beds are
screaming my name, but rather than being out there encouraging my emerging
perennials to be happy they are coming up at MY house instead of at a more
fastidious gardener’s… I am sitting in my office (a dirty word for a sunny
Saturday!) and I am at the computer (the second foul word in one sentence).

Talking About Teaching Reading to Visual Learners

I love conversing with people about things that matter, and
when we are talking about my particular passion, I really love it. So this week,
although I enjoyed two lengthy conversations with really nice ladies about
teaching reading to struggling kids, I came away very frustrated.Would probably benefit greatly from chopping
firewood or tearing down a small building.

During both conversations, I asked questions about what the
child did when trying to read, what is difficult for him/her, and other
questions that usually reveal a lot about what is going on with the child. It sounded
to me like we were talking about visual learners. Being strongly visual myself,
and having worked extensively with visual learners, it is not hard to recognize
them when they are described, so I launched forth comfortably talking about
what visual learners need in order to succeed in reading. But both women glazed
over at various points and looked at me quizzically, as though I was speaking a
foreign language.

The Disconnect

I’ve learned that you can sit two relatively articulate
adults at the same table, introduce a topic, say reading difficulties, and
though both people are using the same terminology, they might talk completely
past each other. The first conversation I had was with a lady who tutors
children; her brochure tagline acknowledges that kids learn in different ways.
“Ah,” I breathed, “This is going to be an AMAZING conversation!”But what happened is that when I talked
enthusiastically about visual learners and how they learn to read, the body
language showed clearly that while she wanted to understand what I was talking
about, she was just not getting it. What to me seemed simple and easy to
understand was completely foreign to her. She did at one point say that she is
very left-brained and just didn’t understand what I was describing. What we had
was two women, roughly the same age, passionate, even sacrificial about helping
kids who are struggling, ready to share solutions with anyone who needs help –
but who were so polar opposite in their own viewpoint that communication was
not happening.

The second conversation was with the mother of a seven year
old boy who sounded to be far brighter than the average child, given her
answers to my questions.He is repeating
first grade, and now is approaching another end of year and is still not
reading. His primary difficulty is in learning sight words and passing the
reading tests. The more I listened to the mother talk about her child, the more
I felt that if I could just give a wee hint or two, I felt pretty certain that
a few tweaks would have her son rocketing into reading in no time. There were
probably just a couple of little understanding gaps to help him with. Her focus
was riveted, however, on where her son was in the standard process of learning
to read, wondering how she was going to get him to master that one skill that
had him repeating first grade – and no wonder! She was not able to even absorb
another option because she was convinced that reading has to be done a certain
way and with certain steps and each step has to be mastered before going on.
Why? Because her son is part of a system that operates by those rules.

In Retrospect

I think my inability to communicate what I could see so
clearly in my head was very much like what happens when a teacher teaches
reading in a way that is crystal clear to her, but the child she is teaching
has no clue what to do with what he heard. The million dollar question is this:
Where is the disconnect? Is it in the brain of the child, and in my case, is it
the fault of the women with whom I was speaking? Were they just not able to
understand? Or could it be that I failed to communicate in a way that they
could receive and understand? The more convinced we are that we are doing a
stellar job of communicating, the easier it is to just blame the hearer for not
being smart enough to “get it.” Which is a massive cop-out.

Mental Blocks

These are not the only two conversations I’ve had that left
me this frustrated and searching for better ways to communicate. Today, after a
mini-rant to my long-suffering brother-in-law in which I was simply warming up
for this blog post, the thoughts began to present themselves. Charles Richard
Gray is an RN who has worked with kids in psychiatric wards for years. He witnesses
what happens
when kids just don’t quite make it, don’t quite fit in, are
processed by the school system and fail, can’t succeed – you name it. Charles sees
the pain behind the behaviors of the kids who are sent to his facility. He
called me one evening to talk about finding SOMETHING to help these kids (many
of them in high school) learn to read. He said that in many cases, failure to
measure up was behind all the troubles they were having in school and at home
and in their lives as a whole. The kids that he works with come with ready-made
labels such as “oppositional defiance.” My heart breaks for the kids in
Charles’ facility. He said the standard demand was for medication. Medicine
that will miraculously turn a child with the label of Asperger's into a “normal”
child! Medicine that will solve the tragedy of their being very bright, but not
looking or acting like the other kids.

I think that Charles has a unique and informed viewpoint in
the discussion about kids who can’t read. He sees what happens to kids who are
labeled and who are not taught in a way that makes any sense to them.

Teaching the Brain Is Not Like Putting Together a Lawnmower

Just before we got off the phone, Charles said, “Teaching a
brain is a whole lot different than putting together a lawn mower.” He
continued, “The brain has many entry points – the eyes, the ears, the sense of
touch, the movement of the body – and for each child, there is one strongest
entry point for learning.”

Of course what he was saying is that there might be one
right way to put a lawnmower together, and usually that way is printed on a big
sheet of paper in four languages, folded and inserted into every box that
contains that model of lawnmower. We cannot, however, persist in assuming that
there is one right way to teach a child to read and judging those who don’t
succeed in learning that way.

The Hill We’re Choosing to Die on

Suddenly I understood him. The point Charles made is the core
of the battle raging in our country over kids who are not learning to read. The
problem is that someone over a century ago created the Steps to Assembling a Lawnmower,
steps which have been revised from time to time over the decades, but that
never vary too much from the original push mower model that first hit the
market. (Just to be clear, the instructions for putting together the lawnmower
in this instance is the accepted method used to teach a child to read.)

We have determined, we live by, we believe in, we choose to die
on the hill that proclaims that there is one right way to teach reading. ALL
else gives way before this belief including our kids. We destroy kids on a
regular basis over this belief! Every child that is tested in this country is
ranked according to how well he or she masters those steps for learning to read.
The steps have become more and more intricate the more Ph.D.s are thrown into
the mix. Each little step has been tweaked and added to so the steps have become
more intricate and elaborate. I want to shout, “Stop! Let’s check our progress!
Is this method successful with our kids?” Kids are failing at reading more now
than they were 30 years ago. The “correct” sequence of steps for teaching
reading, no matter how refined and how elaborate, is not working in hundreds of
thousands of cases.

These Are the Myths We Live by

1. Reading must be taught in little steps. (A wholly left-brained
approach). You have to learn this first step first, then the second one. If you
get stuck on step number three, you have to stay on that step until you master
it. (Fine print: If you stay on step three long enough, you will be tested and
if you can’t pass the test, you will receive special helps in the form of a
name to call what is the matter with you. For the rest of your life, you will carry
and live up to that label.)

2. Reading is very complicated and requires many little doses
of lessons sometimes called “explicit phonics instruction.” Words are broken
into little tiny bits and kids everywhere have to practice reading, writing and
saying these little bits. “What little bits?” you ask. A great example of the
little bits I am talking about can be found in an “Explode the Code” box of
cards. I got my hands on them in the learning center I visited last week and I
could feel the blood draining from my face as I flipped through them. There was
a card and picture for every possible combo of letters…for instance, SL, NT,
SP, LT, oh, and I am bored already. More? GR, GL, ST, SL, oh I already did that
one. Under the guise of providing explicit phonics instruction, this well meaning
company had taken words and flogged them into myriad little fragments and expected
kids to memorize all the fragments along with a sample word, claiming this will
help struggling readers learn to read. If the non-sequential kids (those who
can’t learn and remember little steps to follow) are failing at reading, our
solution for them cannot be to add MORE learning steps to the series of steps
they already couldn’t learn! Doing so is just like speaking to a person in a
language they don’t understand, so we say the same thing again, a bit slower, a
bit louder, with more describing words.

3. That the way to learn is to memorize what did not come
easily at first glance, and then if memorization doesn’t work quickly, we
practice and practice. Didn’t work the first time, but we are NOT going to give
up; we are going to do the thing that failed again and again. And again. And if
we are totally passionate about making that child read, we will do it scores
more times. We’ll do it for years if necessary!

4. If one step is difficult, all the steps will be equally so.
If a child is struggling…say he can’t sound out words… he must master this step
if he ever hopes to read. If two years, three years, maybe four go by and the
child is still having trouble sounding out words (and by now would rather burn
down the school than have to expose his inability to read in front of his
taunting peers) it is assumed that if the child could finally master that one
skill, all the successive skills would be equally difficult for him. So the
conclusion is he is learning disabled. It is this type of child my
brother-in-law talks with regularly.

5. In order to read you MUST learn all the phonics rules. You
must be able to do really interesting phonemic awareness activities such as
reading nonsense words really fast and accurately with a stop watch in your
peripheral vision clutched by a lady who came into your room, called your name
and took you out for testing. In addition to reading nonsensical sequences of
letters (for instance, “glaft” or “fripper” or “sloggen”) you also have to be
able to rapidly take words apart into all their native sounds really fast. Say
you have no trouble reading the real words on the page (might have done better
without the stopwatch) but you can’t decipher the made-up words, nor can you
break a word apart into its phonemes quickly… you will not score at grade level
for reading. All of this will be determined about you in the handful of minutes
it takes to administer the test.

6. Learning sight words is a hindrance. If a child memorizes
the Dolch sight word list or some other compiled list of high-frequency words, it
is widely believed that while she might be successful in learning those words,
she will fail when those words are no longer the bulk of the content she has to
read in school. For example, in third grade most of the texts she reads may be in other subjects
such as science and math. The conviction is that once text
includes other words NOT on the Dolch list of sight words, the child will
completely flounder and will not be able to read past the second or third grade
level. Many people therefore condemn the acquisition of sight words as
detrimental to the child. There is actually a man posting videos on You Tube alliteratively
titled Dolch =Dyslexia. If you are curious enough to listen, go check it out.
He is a solid purist when it comes to memorizing phonics rules as the way to
learn to read! According to him, what is wrong with America is the insistence
by schools that children memorize sight words.

I Feel Sure You Are Waiting for the Point with Baited Breath

But the sun is going down, my elderly cat is snoring and I
don’t have dinner on. I do feel better for having written, and thanks for
reading. I also feel sure you will come rushing back for the next post in which
I tell you my theories on how reading can be simplified for the very kids we believe
cannot learn! So while I’m cooking dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, and gazing
sadly in the twilight at my weedy flower beds, please keep one thought at the
front of your mind: Reading is not a mystery. (Well two thoughts). Those kids
who are having the most trouble now will learn more readily than "regular"
kids if we abandon the instruction sheet for putting together the lawnmower we
are clutching for dear life and try something radically different.

Okay, I need to hear your ideas about how to teach these kids who haven't learned to read.
I have been a teacher of kids with reading problems for years - each one is different and respond to different techniques. Lots of mixing and matching going on. Phonics, sight words, the whole ball of wax. Individually
designed remediation appears to be the most effective approach from my experience.

I'd love to hear more from you about what some of your successful strategies have been, so feel free to email me from our website; i will get it and answer myself. http://www.child-1st.com
There will be three more posts coming on this topic; but in a nutshell my feeling is that many kids who struggle need multiple avenues into the brain, so they must have visuals, some need a body motion, some need something like a story or jingle to connect the concept they are learning with a memory prompt. We've worked really hard to include all those elements in our products so that they will help a variety of learners. Those who don't need the body motion just don't focus on that, for instance.
Would love to hear from you.